Benjamin Tuttle spent years designing for a Brooklyn microcinema – it all led him to Netflix’s Beef

It didn’t make it to the publication, but is immortalised on Benjamin’s Instagram, just three posts after his post on the process of designing the letters and type for A24 and Netflix’s Beef. “Earlier this year, I updated the colours and shared a link for people to download and print it,” he tells It’s Nice That. “It is sad that something I drew seven years ago is still relevant.”

Across Benjamin’s work, the past and present come together in a way that’s not always intentional. The relevance, if any, only emerges later, like the ICE illustration. For the second season of Netflix’s Emmy-award-winning anthology, Beef, in which two couples spiral into blackmail and extortion at an elite California country club, Benjamin was commissioned to design the series title and episode lettering under the showrunner Lee Sung Jin’s creative direction. Benjamin’s canvas stretched all the way from Stanley Kubrick to Flemish punchcutters of the 18th century. “This season was set at a country club, so there was that upper-class setting, a certain genre of typeface that speaks to wealth, and we wanted to tap into that,” he says.

When Lee Sung Jin showed Benjamin some of the paintings that were going to be in the background of the episode titles, it was all the reason Benjamin needed to collapse various time periods in the lettering. A lot of the paintings were Dutch, Flemish, Belgian, from the late Renaissance and Baroque period. “I love the type from that time and that region,” he says. “So, I tried to steer the ship in that direction.”

Benjamin’s contribution to the second season of Beef, with all its wild experimentations and leaps of inspiration, makes more sense when one looks at his poster work for Spectacle Theater: a Brooklyn microcinema that barely seats 35 people at a time, is fully run and operated by volunteers, with a ticket costing five dollars. New York is home to repertory cinema, and even within that space, Spectacle screens the most “weird and obscure stuff”.

“I credit Spectacle with saving my career because I had worked in-house at various graphic design jobs, constantly answering to bosses on weekends on fonts that weren’t even mine,” he says. For Spectacle, Benjamin would send a poster to the programmers and poster coordinators, and all he’d get back was an empathic ‘Thank you!’ It became a space to experiment, to work fast, and have fun. “Sometimes you find out about a screening a week beforehand, so you maybe have a weekend to get it done. There is no urgency in the usual sense because no one is getting paid. We are all volunteers,” he says.

Consider Benjamin’s poster for a double bill of two concert films. The first on Taj Mahal Travellers, a Japanese experimental music ensemble founded in 1969, and the second on Les Rallizes Dénudés, a Japanese psychedelic noise rock band also from the late 60s. “The poster flips for which movie you want, one on each side; the text in the middle flips too. So, whatever movie is playing, that part faces up. I just drew that one day, scanned it in, threw the photos in there, and that was it.”

As erratic as the process sounds, there is order. The Taj Mahal Travellers’ side is more psychedelic, its letterforms bathed in acid. For the Les Rallizes Dénudés part, the shapes are electric; a tornado-like form reflects the cascading, droning music of the cult band. For the Spectacle poster of Action USA, the 1989 film by John Stewart, Benjamin edits out all the chaos and focuses on just one scene from the film: a car crashing dramatically through the roof of a house, the whole action scene depicted through a sequential narrative in a nine-square grid. In the first box, the house is normal, followed by other boxes where it is normal too, then the car enters the frame and goes up in flames in the final square. “Obviously, if a car drove into a house, the explosion would never be that big, but it certainly is in the over-the-top action movie,” he says. “I don’t get professional illustration work, so the posters are a place for me to work a muscle where I otherwise wouldn’t.”